In September, NASA told us that August 2014 was the warmest August on record. Then, to add insult to injury, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tacked this onto that ominous message: There's a good chance 2014 could become the warmest year on record.
The news seems unlikely to those of us living in the eastern portion of the United States. After all, we've seen a relatively cool year so far, with a frigid winter followed by a near-average summer and a fall that is taking to winter earlier than usual.
But NOAA has used data to paint this world map showing that the eastern U.S. was "pretty much the only land area in the globe that had cooler-than-average temperatures," said Jake Crouch, a climatologist with NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, during a September news briefing.
So our planet is running a temperature.
From January through October, the globe measured 1.22°F above the 20th-century average of 57.4°F. The first 10 months of 2014 were the warmest such period since record keeping began in 1880.
Climate Central, an independent organization of leading scientists and journalists who research and report the facts about our changing climate, puts it this way: The five warmest years on record have been 2010, 2005, 1998, 2013, and 2003, in that order. And of those, 1998 was the only year that didn't occur in the 21st century, showing how much global temperatures have risen due to the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Last week, on the heels of a landmark U.S. and China deal to reduce climate change-causing carbon pollution, two Google engineers published a paper titled: "What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change." In it, they recounted Google's failed REC aspirational goal to produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant could, and to achieve this in years, not decades.
But the Google engineers, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, write in their posted report that their false hope doesn't mean the planet is doomed.
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today's renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach," they write.
So they're issuing a call to action that will depend on more than just alternative and renewable energy sources. It also will require a different kind of distribution to keep costs down (read more here on Sunday), a revolutionizing of energy research and development that will stress proven technologies like hydro, wind, solar, phovoltaics and nuclear energy but save 20 percent of R&D funds for technologies like thin-film solar PV and a next-generation nuclear fission reactor and "keep a pot of money for 'crazy' ideas like cheap fusion."
Perhaps technology would change the economic rules of the game by producing not just electricity but also fertilizer, fuel or desalinated water, the pair wrote.
But that's not all. "We're all for more trees [as a carbon sink,] and we also exhort scientists and engineers to seek disruptive technologies in carbon storage."
Fox News did a piece on this report Tuesday. But here was the Fox take-away: "Google engineers' renewable energy won't solve climate change."
Fox said the paper "illustrates that the promise of green energy has been over-hyped." The piece also states the Google engineers' conclusion was that "America needs to spend more resources on researching 'ideas that may seem crazy but might have huge impact.'"
Here's our conclusion: Friends don't let friends watch only Fox News. Read this interesting report for yourself here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change.